A new paper on Quantifying irreversible movement in steep, fractured bedrock permafrost on Matterhorn (CH) by Samuel Weber, Jan Beutel, Jérome Faillettaz, Andreas Hasler, Michael Krautblatter and Andreas Vieli was published in The Cryosphere. The paper analyzes the past eight year of measurement data from the Matterhorn crackmeters and proposes an analysis method to separate elastic from plastic deformation as well as a discussion of the origin of such deformation.

Following the development of an energy harvesting system for the PermaSense wireless sensor nodes in a Master Thesis by Dominic Bernath we installed the first prototype devices for a field test in Jungfraujoch, CH at the beginning of November 2016. These energy harvesters work on the thermolectric principle and harvest electric energy from the heat exchange between the rock surface and the atmosphere (radiation). Two devices were installed on the south flank near the High-Alpine Research Station Jungfraujoch and one on the north side down from the Sphinx terrace.2

Congratulations to Dr. Marco Zimmerling, who was announced to receive the 2015 ACM SIGBED Paul Caspi Memorial Dissertation Award! The committee honors Dr. Zimmerling for his thesis "End-to-end Predictability and Efficiency in Low-power Wireless Networks", which he completed at ETH Zurich. Dr. Zimmerling has been leading cfaed's Networked Embedded Systems Group since November 2015.

The ACM SIGBED Paul Caspi Memorial Dissertation Award is given by the Special Interest Group on Embedded Systems(SIGBED) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). ACM is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society. The award has been established in 2013 in memory of Dr. Paul Caspi (1944-2012). The award recognizes outstanding doctoral dissertations that significantly advance the state of the art in the science of embedded systems. The winner was selected by a committee, chaired by Prof. Wang Yi. Seven nominations for the award have been received from Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, and USA.

The field site on the Aig. du Midi, Chamonix France saw some service node to retrieve data from webcams as well as repair a faulty relays wireless sensor node. Despite the mid winter conditions at 3840 m a.s.l. were perfect with no wind and mild temperatures.

In a last push before the climbing season imminent we finalized the installation of the spectral profiling experiment at the Matterhorn, 2nd couloir. We now have 3x L1-GPS, 2x geophones, 1x 3-axial accelerometer and 2x acoustic emission sensors in place to capture the frequency signatures of motions and rock deformation. All sensor systems are online, connected through wireless LAN and our Dozer network. This allows to control and supervise the experiment and download the precious data.

Two PhD students from PermaSense have recently completed their PhD theses: Congratulations to Ben Buchli for the thesis titled "Power Subsystem Design and Management for Solar Energy Harvesting Embedded Systems" and Vanessa Wirz for her thesis titled "Short-term variability of cryosphere-related slope movements (Continuous GPS measurements in the Mattertal, Switzerland)".

Two new geophones have been installed around the detachment zone of the 2003 rockfall at the Matterhorn Hoernli ridge. They are a continuation of last years acoustic emission and seismic profiling experiment, now with all online sensors in order to better be able to retrieve data and monitor instrument status. This field work is happening just days after a spontaneous rockfall from the detachment zone destroyed the mounting points of two crackmeter sensors at positions 2 and 20. This event illustrates nicely that indeed, the mountain is continuously changing, the 2003 detachment zone is still active and our research is focusing on the right spot in order to better understand the processes of steep bedrock stability/instability.

Field work was performed at the Matterhorn field site with the objective to service all sensor nodes (firmware upgrade) and retrieve the Acoutic Emission experiment and Geophone data from the detachment zone in the 2nd couloir. We had stellar conditions with perfect blue sky, warming sun rays and no wind on the east side of the ridge. The strong snow storms of the last bad weather periods led to an immense accumulation of snow in the steep rock faces of the Matterhorn. Winterwonderland.

Samuel Weber was invited to hold a public lecture at the Naturforschenden Gesellschaft Oberwallis NfGO in Brig on 27.11.2014: Permafrost: instrumentieren, messen, Prozesse verstehen und modellieren. This was an excellent possibility to showcase our PermaSense research to a broad public audience and to the people local to the scenarios we are researching.

Three new Wireless GPS units were installed in Matter Valley. The sensors are located on two areas under surveillance by the authorities (Wisse Schije and Laengschnee) and are part of the collaboration of PermaSense and the local authorities. Installation took place in late November 2014 with Saemi, Tonio, Roman as well as Marcia Phillips (SLF) and Leo Joerger (Randa) in deep winter conditions. Additionally some service work was undertaken in Grabengufer.

The weekly magazine "Migros Magazin" with a circulation of 1'558'467 in print reported on the PermaSense project activities. We were joined by a team of journalists on our excursion to the Dirruhorn field site in Matter valley earlier this fall. Read the article "Die Bergdoktoren" below:

A comprehensive paper on a novel methodology to accurately estimate surface movement velocities from measured L1-GPS has recently been published in Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences. This paper uses the data from the X-Sense field site in the Matter Valley, CH.

The X-Sense2 project held a successful workshop and excursion to the Mattervalley field site. We were joined by some visitors as well as a journalist for some forthcoming coverage on the project. Besides intense discussion and an update from all workpackages on the workshop day we were able to see the mass movements and sensor installations in the Bielzug, Dirru and Grabengufer rock glaciers.

The first instruments of the new acoustic and seismic emission experiment were installed on the top of the 2nd couloir on Matterhorns Hoernli Ridge in August 2014. The work conditions were not ideas, almost like in winter and very instable weather. But thanks to support from Hoernlihuette, Alpincenter Zermatt, Air Zermatt, Arcteryx and Hilti we were able to install the first high frequency sensors and two L1-GPS units in the top of the detachment zone of the 2003 rockfall.

A new project collaboration with Martin Funk (VAW, ETH Zurich) and Martin Truffer (U. Alaska, Fairbanks) targets the long-term observation of the Bisgletscher above Randa, CH. For this purpose a GPRI radar instrument from Gamma Remote Sensing was installed at Domhuette. The radar is connected to the WLAN backbone of PermaSense. The high bandwidth link allows to control the system and access the data remotely. It is planned to operate the radar system over the summer/autumn 2014 in a pilot phase.

The nano-tera.ch annual meeting 2013 was held in Bern in the magnificent Kursaal venue. The meeting featured project presentations, posters and demos. Roman Lim received a best-poster award for the poster/demo "Roman Lim, Federico Ferrari, Marco Zimmerling, Christoph Walser, Jan Beutel: FlockLab: A Testbed for Distributed, Synchronized Tracing and Profiling of Wireless Embedded Systems." Additionally partner project OpenSense received a best video award for their video contribution.

An interesting excursion to Nagra's Grimsel Test Site gave us a good overview of what it means to develop for long-term: Nuclear waste deposits plan for the next 1 Million years! We received an excellent tour and demonstration by Thomas Spillmann who presented this fascinating facility. The TEM project even uses wireless sensors located deep inside bentonite and behind a massive 4m concrete seal that are capable of transmitting data through 30m of solid Grimsel granite.

In two busy days on France on the Aiguille du Midi we installed a wireless transmission for the EDYTEM permafrost boreholes using PermaSense sensor nodes. Access the data on our online data portal: http://data.permasense.ch

We also performed some service activities and installed more wireless relay nodes for better connectivity at this exceptional field site perched high above Chamonix.

The team of Tonio, Christoph, Jan and Saemi were at the Randa and Dirruhorn field sites for a day to perform some end-of-winter service tasks on the GPS sensors and cameras. All the area was still covered under a thick layer of spring snow. No significant damages were seen after the long winter, the weather was beautiful and all the service work went smoothly. We were accompanied by journalist Agnes Fazekas who will be writing about our research work. Read about her first impressions on the natur blog.

The annual report 2012 of ETH Zurich is featuring PermaSense research funded by NCCR MICS as one of the success stories of the past year under the headline "Partnership leads to research successes". Thank you team for the hard work and good spirit! Read the full article on page 22 of the annual report.

Over 1000 participants enjoyed the demonstration stands, presentations and lab visits at Treffpunkt Science City held at ETH Zurich on Sunday April 7, 2013. PermaSense was participating with a demo stand and a presentation lecture on "Klimawandel am Matterhorn". We had many interesting interactions with the visitors ranging from the very young across all age ranges.

Bernhard Buchli presented his paper titled "Battery State-of-Charge Approximation for Energy Harvesting Embedded Systems" at the 10th European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN) held in Ghent, Belgium. Felix Sutton also presented a demonstration of his "Ultra-Low Power Wireless Multi-Sensor Interface".

EWSN is one of the leading and highly selective international conferences in the area of Wireless Sensor Networks, and has played a prominent role in the dissemination of innovative ideas from researchers all over the globe.

Saemi Weber and Jan Beutel used the stable weather in early January for long standing service work at the Matterhorn field site. The acoustic emission experiment installed in July 2012 was taken down and the power system equipped with extra batteries to allow uninterrupted operation of the sensor systems even in harsh winter conditions.

On this trip we got the chance to try the new Bell 429 helicopter. It is quite a difference from the good old Lama, very comfy, silent and she even TALKS to you!

ETH Globe, the quarterly magazine of ETH Zurich, published an article about PermaSense written by reporter Peter Ruegg. Peter accompanied us on a field trip to Matterhorn Hoernligrat in June 2012 to report first-hand about the work on the mountain. Despite the short notice, only 2 days in advance, Peter willingly accepted and showed his courage on the helicopter hoist operation involved in getting to the Matterhorn site.

The article is available in print (25'000 issues) and online in both german and english.

nano-tera.ch is funding the new project "MEMS acoustic detectors for natural hazard warning systems" as a succession of X-Sense+. The project focuses on trigger-based sensors for detecting possibly destructive mass movement events and brings a new area of research, nanotechnology, to PermaSense. The project duration is for four years and the partners Lothar Thiele, Jan Buetel, Stephan Gruber, Andreas Vieli, Christopher Hierold, Cosmin Roman and Hugo Raetzo will commence work in November 2013.

The paper Visualizing Large Sensor Network Data Sets in Space and Time with Vizzly has recently been presented at SenseApp 2012 in Clearwater, Florida. Following this oral presentation, Vizzly was also released to the public and is now available for free as open source software.

Tonio Gsell, Fabian Neyer, Philippe Limpach and Saemi Weber successfully installed two new high-resolution cameras on the ridge at Grabengufer. The tow units will generate for stereogrammetric analysis of the top depression zone on the Grabengufer rock glacer.

A second PermaSense alpine safety training course was held in Zermatt from September 23-27, 2012. The participants were instructed and trained in skills including helicopter operations, rescue, orienteering, travelling in open terrain, alpine dangers, work safety, rope access techniques and the planning and coordination of field work.

With the NCCR MICS, one of our main funding sources coming to an end in November 2012 Andreas Hasler received an award for his dissertation "Thermal conditions and kinematics of steep bedrock permafrost" at the MICS Final Event at EPFL, Sept 4-5, 2012.

Additionally also Stephan Gruber gave a talk on "PermaSense: Development and application of distributed sensing systems in high-mountain environments" as well as a new video highlighting PermaSense is presented to the public.

Jan Beutel and Stephan Gruber gave a public lecture on PermaSense at Scientifica 2012: Berge in Bewegung - Forschung am Matterhorn. It was a very fun event and we had nice discussions about our research with event the smallest participants at about 8 years of age asking questions like: "Why is there rockfall?" The answer given had something to do with LEGOs...

Starting on August 9 we installed an Acoustic Emission prototype measurement on the Matterhorn Hoernliridge field site. This is an initial test to see what kind of high-frequency acoustic emissions are generated in such a heterogeneous environment. For this purpose a temporary solar power system was installed on the top of the MH second couloir detachment. After an initial install and some service trips the system is now operational. It is expected to be taken down after the climbing season before winter closes in with big snow falls.

From July 16-19, 2012, Andi, Saemi, Felix and Jan undertook extensive field site maintenance in the Dirruhorn area. A total of 2.44 GB GPS data has been retrieved and apart from some minor issues all systems have been found to survive the winter at high altitude in good shape. Additionally some new GPS sensors were installed in the Graechen area for the Federal Office of the Environment (BAFU) in an effort to transfer X-Sense technology research to practice in industrial applicartions.

Together with our French colleagues Philip Deline and Ludovic Ravanel of EDYTEM/Univ. Savoie we set up a wireless system to measure the crack movement on the Aiguille du Midi in Chamonix/France.

The online system is similar to the wireless sensor system running on the Matterhorn and is expected to augment the existing experimental evidence from boreholes and ERT measurements on the steep bedrock permafrost on this prominent peak.

The WLAN access got moved to a new location on the summit of the Klein Matterhorn in the north portal of the gondola. This new location is perfectly shielded and should give reliable operation for all PermaSense networks.

Additionally field work with the re-installation of a broken crackmeter was performed at Matterhorn.

The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) issued a press release today on the measurements and results obtained from the wireless sensor network at the Matterhorn field site published in a recent paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

A keynote featuring the PermaSense wireless sensor network technology was given by Jan Beutel at the Extreme Conference on Communication (ExtremeCom 2012) held in Grindelwald. The Keynote talk was held at Jungfraujoch with a visit to the High-Altitude Research Station Jungfraujoch and the PermaSense installations.

The PermaSense team presented the project as well as the measurement results from the Matterhorn field site to authorities and interested public in Zermatt. The event brought together about 30 people and was hosted by Air Zermatt followed by an apero and lively discussion.

The Jungfraujoch field site has been waiting on a servicing trip for two months now to upgrade faulty PermaDozer software on the sensor nodes. Musti, Roman and Jan spent two days up high with ropes, laptops and down jackets while watching the Wengen downhill races from the distance on the Joch. All nodes are back to normal operation now.

Just before the end of the year the PermaSense data interface is just getting ready to go public. Check out data.permasense.ch to see our live sensor data on the internet. Currently we are still testing and fixing the last issues, but you should see more and more coming over the next couple of days. The PermaSense data inferface is built on GSN with PSbacklog and a custom metadata handling and data conversion software.

Following the Wireless LAN installation the cameras finally came to the mountain. Mountainview is taking pictures at a breathtaking 12 Mpixel every 3 hours and the webcam can be access in a daily/weekly lapse mode as well as with single images. At the moment the mountainview images are accessd from Matthias Keller's webpage.

Our first summer trip to Zermatt was dedicated to the installation of a long-range Wireless LAN link from Klein Matterhorn to our field sites on the Hoernliridge. The access point was is mounted on the precipitation radar on Klein Matterhorn (thanx Maurizio) and links to Hoernlihuette and the Hoernliridge field site where we installed a new base station, weather station and camera.

Hilti sponsored a brand new TE-7A LiIon powered cordless hammer drill (their best piece) for the PermaSense project. It arrived this week and we are truly thrilled with this new tool. It will be of good service on our next field campaigns. Thank you very much!

PermaSense has a prototype of the new high-resolution imager mounted on the rooftop testbed on the ETZ building in Zurich. It is built based on the new linux-based PermaSense BaseBoard and can communicate with our sensor nodes and also via Wireless LAN or GSM/GPRS/EDGE. It is pretty heavy (We even had to pay overweight when taking it to Ireland to demo at the EWSN demo session!), but since it doesn't move and you only install once, that's ok. Check out our automated and battery powered 12 Mega pixel images here: Mountainview Demo

After 5 months of continuous and mostly flawless operation Andi and Jan went to Zermatt for a look around, some field servicing and installation of another two relay nodes higher up on the ridge. All in all our Matterhorn field site looks great and is well set for the upcoming spring measurement season. The recent high winds really swept the mountain faces clean and there was only little snow and ice around even though it is mid-winter.

February 02 - 04, 2009: Installation of the Jungfraujoch field site. After the foen storm ceased, 10 sensor nodes, 3 relays and a Wireless LAN base station were installed at the high altitude research station Jungfraujoch. The PermaSense project now has two field sites operational. Overall, the Jungfraujoch is much easier to install and deploy since we have power, internet, a workshop and all nodes can be conveniently reached by rappelling off the platform of the Spynx.

Mid-winter maintenance on Matterhorn (Jan & Lorenz): A hardware problem at the base station was repaired and the system restarted. At the same time all 15 nodes were replaced. The new nodes have an upgraded memory with 1 GB capacity. This should ensure that no data will be lost in the future - even in severe weather conditions.